


We begin as plans and build to dreams

by geoclaire



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Carmilla and Laura are hopeless for a really long time, F/F, FFAU, Firefighter AU, Will POV, alternative POV, fanfic remix, zbrockman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-13
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 15:05:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3733357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geoclaire/pseuds/geoclaire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carmilla doesn’t care about anyone unless she really, really cares, and you know what it looks like when she loves you.</p><p>This is Will's POV of zbrockman's Firefighter AU, "You bite your tongue and torch your dreams", written with her full consent. It can be read on its own (i.e. standalone).</p><p>You can find the first one in the series here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/3297341/chapters/7199156</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [you bite your tongue and you torch your dreams](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3297341) by [orphan_account](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account). 



> Cee let me read Laura's POV for her FFAU, and then was gracious enough to let me write Will's perspective for the same universe.

Your father left when you were four. Your mother died when you were eight.

Since then, Carmilla has been all the family you've had, and probably all the family you need. Because of that, probably, the need to cling to your sole remaining family member, you know her better than you know yourself.  


Like, she isn't in the habit of looking at things straight on. Everything is a metaphor for something else, everything has a deeper meaning. She taught you to love the stars before you knew your mother's name was Andromeda; she questioned God long before you started skipping Sunday school.  


She isn’t easy - not to be around, not to work with, not to understand. Not when her every thought comes in layers with a philosophy reference tying it together. She doesn’t like to show her feelings or share what she’s thinking, prefers to be thought of as a detached badass who ignores everyone to the maximum extent possible.  


But it doesn’t matter, really, because her first language may be sarcasm and her only acknowledged life references have been translated from French, but you’ve known her your entire life and that makes her an open book. It’s not even necessarily that she tries to be open and available to you, just that having this much practice makes her easy to read.  


She’s kind of resentful about it. But she’s your sister, and she’s clung closer to you than to anyone else in her life. The two of you made it through the foster system together without getting a totally fucked up perception of family, so yeah, somewhere along the line you must have figured out what makes her tick.  


And Carmilla doesn’t care much about people, not really. She cared about your parents, and she cares about you, and she cares about her team. Once upon a time, she cared about that chick Ell, and look where that got her. Now she cares about saving people, and not being the person who had loved Ell so much it made her teeth hurt, who had been involved in something so fucking stupid that someone died. Probably that’s why she tries so hard not to care about anyone else, but you're family, and it's like it's against her rules to block you out.  


So yeah, you field a lot of concerned phone calls that you don’t exactly need (you can feed yourself three solids a day and you’ve never left a stove on in your life), but you don’t mind. Because Carmilla doesn’t care about anyone unless she really, really cares, and you know what it looks like when she loves you.  


  
  
  
  
  
  


Carmilla has been looking at Laura Hollis since she was thirteen years old.

It took you a while to figure that out, because yeah, Carmilla doesn’t really look at anyone like that. Not like she cares about anything they have to say. Most of the time she avoids eye contact if at all possible, does her best impression of a high functioning hermit, and then breaks out and does a girl whose name she’ll barely remember the next day. Honestly you’re not even sure how she finds half the girls she sleeps with; how does one meet people when you don’t willingly make eye contact?  


But yeah, she’s always looked at Laura.  


It took you a while to figure out that the woman who died in that fire had been her mother. And then - wow. Like wow, Carmilla, of all the people to decide you care about the opinion of, you pick the fire chief’s daughter.  


  
  
  
  
  
  


Only it wasn't quite that simple, because her Dad seemed to be the one who wanted Carmilla around, and maybe it’s because she and Laura were both just kids, but he never quite seemed to hold a grudge.

On the contrary, he dispatched Carmilla to watch over Laura at every possible moment she was out of his sight, including every party Laura was ever invited to, where she hovered awkwardly in the corner and disdained frankly terrible passes from kids who were closer to your age than hers.  


Laura held a grudge, but it was about the number of underage drinks Carmilla prevented her from having, and her way of intervening before Laura ever ended up kissing some frankly dubious young men from her high school.  


Carmilla also got pretty pissed at you the one time that you tried to kiss Laura Hollis at a party, but hey, a guy can try, and it’s not like she ever made a move. Maybe you were trying to provoke her into actually doing something, but you don’t remember any more.  


And anyway, not long after that Laura came out as gay, so maybe Carmilla kinda owed you one.  


(She smacked you around the back of the head and didn’t talk to you for three days and never told you why.)  


(You made sure no one gave Laura a hard time at school.)  


  
  
  
  
  
  


When you finished high school, you got out of town. You’d turned eighteen a few months earlier, and your foster mother was about ready to turf you out then and there, but Carmilla had some kind of conversation with her that ended with you being able to live there until you’d at least graduated. You’d happily have stayed with Carmilla, but she was still in her early days as a firefighter, and between training and call outs she was up at all hours of the night and had made a pretty strong argument against it being an ideal place to be studying.

So you leave town, and after a while you leave the next town, and the next. There’s nothing in particular keeping you in any of them, so you keep wandering, looking for something you can’t even name yet.  


Eventually, you get on a plane on a dumb bet, something you’d declaimed boldly at the end of a night of drinking with the short order cook and waitress at the diner you’ve been half-heartedly working at. They laugh at you, and somehow that’s the prompt you need to move to another fucking country.  


When you arrive in Canada, you call Carmilla. She swears at you for whole minutes, coming dangerously close to using all of the credit you’ve got on the airport phone. Partly it’s that you’d moved to another fucking country without telling her first, but mostly because you’d woken her up.  


When she stops swearing, she tells you to get an apartment and a job and figure out what the fuck it is you’re doing here. She’ll wire you some money to make sure you have enough for bond. She’ll be there in a month and you’d better have a fucking plan by then.  


She hangs up the phone and you’re a little shell shocked. You figure you’d better start off by getting through immigration.  


  
  
  
  


When she shows up a month and two days later, you do in fact have an apartment and you’ve even enrolled in community college.  Sure, it’s a dim cubbyhouse of an apartment, and you’ve enrolled for coffee art training as part of your new role as a barista, but it’s starting to feel like everything is settling into place for you.

Lately you’ve been doing a lot of thinking about your life, and what it is you want it to look like. Scraping by, keeping your head down with your eye on the next exit out, doesn’t exactly seem like a long term staying strategy, but maybe it’s all you know how to do. That’s how you’d gotten through high school, how you’d survived your foster family. It’s good, now, that you have some money and a medium term plan, even something approaching job skills, but it’s not going to keep you going for long.  


You tell Carmilla some of this when she arrives. She listens to you lolling on your couch, where she’d crashed as soon as the two of you arrived from the airport, and promptly fallen asleep. She’d blamed it on jetlag, but your money was on the lunatic graveyard shift hours she works. Now, she’s lying on her back, face half smashed into a cushion and her shoes still on, but you can tell she’s listening.  


She sighs when you finish. “I don’t know why you’re telling me, Willy-boy, I’m not exactly the role model for long term plans,” she says.  


You sit by her on the couch. “Ah, bullshit. You got us out of the foster system and you got into the Fire Department,” you remind her. She raises her eyebrows, conceding the point, and blows her bangs out of her face.  


“Yeah, but most of that wasn’t planned, it just kinda seemed like the best option at the time,” she says, and you roll your eyes.  


“Yeah but you knew what you wanted, Carm. I’m still figuring that out. And I kinda think it might be important.”  


“Yeah, well,” she says, “How about for starters, you don’t hop any more country boundaries without telling your only living relative first?”  


“You think I can afford a plane ticket right now?” You gesture around the room, to the single window and perpetually damp kitchen, “This hovel is being paid for out of your meagre earnings, sister.”  


“Shut the fuck up William.”  


  
  
  
  
  


She stays for five days on your shitty couch and despite her own self deprecation, manages to give you some good advice, starting with learning a skill beyond writing your own phone number in milk froth.

“Well, some of us don’t have your skills, Carmilla. This week is probably the longest time you’ve gone without sex since you turned eighteen,”  


She smirks suggestively, “What makes you think I haven’t had sex this week?”  


“Oh - foul, Carmilla! On that couch? Gross.”  


“Who said anything about the couch?”  


You throw something at her.  


A month after she leaves, you submit the paperwork to enrol at a local university in architecture. All things considered, you like the thought of learning about structure.  


  
  
  
  
  


You don’t see Carmilla for a couple years after that, other than on Skype. She gets heavily involved in her training and qualification, and you’re pretty buried in your studies. Neither of you make enough money or have enough time to go jetsetting on a regular basis. But it doesn’t always seem to matter; she seems to note and then give you shit about every change in your apartment, and when you finally balance the books enough to rent somewhere without a perpetually damp floor, you call her before even your real estate agent.

“About fucking time, Willy-boy! You sounded consumptive all winter, I figured the kitchen was going to do you in one night,” she says, shoving her hair out of her eyes one-handed. She looks tired, her cheekbones in high relief.  


You sit back in your chair, “You and me both, but such is the joy of student living, right?”  


“Wouldn’t know,” she says briefly, but seems to perk up, “Hey, how’s school?”  


You roll your eyes, “My urban design lecturer is an ignorant dimwit and my sustainable design readings are literally from the eighties. Which is bullshit, I thought we’d be learning about the new developments happening every damn day, you know?”  


She blinks, heavy lidded on the screen, “Will, I swear to god, the only thing I know about building design is what a good fire escape should look like.”  


She’s got you there. But she’s your older sister, and sometimes you just take it for granted that she knows everything you do and more. She always has.  


You twirl the mouse cable, hesitant now. “Well, what makes a good fire escape?”  


She snorts a laugh. “Wide set and concrete. Standardised doors. Space to swing a battering ram,” and she leans into the camera, miming swinging the ram.  


“You look just like Dad when you do that,” you say without thinking.  


You’ve startled her, but you think she’s pleased too, a little. “What, swinging a battering ram? I don’t remember Pops ever doing that,” she jokes drily.  


“No, just… you have his nose, that’s all,” you say, and she nods and then changes the subject to something the Chief had said over lunch.  


  



	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is still zbrockman's sandbox, in which she lets me play.
> 
> Also, this will now be chapter two of three. Does that make y'all happy?

Somewhere along the line, you work out that a bunch of the lunches she shares with the Chief aren’t actually work lunches and don’t take place in the Fire Department. No, they’re actual weekend lunches, like most people have with their grandparents, only Carmilla is having them with Laura Hollis and her father.

When the penny finally drops, you ask Carmilla about it straight-out. You don’t understand how this has not been a bigger deal. She just looks puzzled on your computer screen.

“Yeah, it’s been a thing for a while now. The Chief just wanted to talk through rosters one week and we ran outta time, so he said come over for lunch, and,” she shrugs, “Everyone knows he’s an awesome cook, so why not?”

“And Laura?”

“Don’t tell me you’re still pining over her, Willy-boy,” she says, and it’s meant to be joking but she sounds ominous instead. “She’s as gay as the day is long. And she was over at the Chief’s when I came for lunch and she said I should come again, so I did.”

Sweet Jesus, these two. The mind boggles at what they’d actually talk about if they ever spent ten minutes along together in a room.

You’re grasping. “So what, you guys are friends now?”

_That_ makes her visibly uncomfortable, even on your tiny Skype screen. Her shoulders tighten, then drop. “More like friendly, I guess.”

You backtrack rapidly. “Not that there’s anything - uh - I mean, it’d be nice if you like, had a friend?”

She rolls her eyes, but she’s relaxing now. “You sound ridiculous, William.”

“I’m just saying that Laura’s nice and maybe she could teach you a few things about how normal humans interact, Carm.” You stress, trying to get her away from thinking about Laura’s mother.

Her jaw tenses again, but less this time. “Yeah, well, maybe.”

When you get off Skype, you take your opportunity and bang your head on the desk a few times. So it’s weird that she and Laura are friends, but whatever. The last thing you want is for Carmilla to feel any more guilty about what happened to Laura's mother.

  
  
  
  
  


When you manage to scrape together the money for a flight home, you see some of this in action. Carmilla is clearly unwilling to give up her weekly lunch date just because you’ve flown in from another country - “It’s the only nutritionally balanced meal I’ll eat all week, William,” - so you get onto Laura and talk yourself into an invitation. It isn’t hard; you and Laura shared some high school classes and went to the same parties, and apparently Carmilla ‘talks about you all the time’. You pocket that fact for a later date and dig out your best chinos.

Laura picks you both up bang on time, wearing tight jeans and a classy red shirt that makes you glad you’d harassed Carmilla into finding you an iron. Your chinos and button down shirt weren’t remotely expensive, but they look like you made an effort. Carmilla’s effort appears to have maxed out at brushing her hair and matching a black t shirt to her black leather pants. It doesn’t seem to matter, because Laura’s gaze follows her wherever she goes.

Laura’s father vaguely remembers you, and you answer his polite queries while Laura sets the table and Carmilla smirks in the corner. Over lunch, you’re relieved when he forgets his manners long enough to interrogate Laura over her work, and then Carmilla about the minutiae of their fire team. Carmilla, you learn, is well on track to being the next Fire Chief, something that has in no way come up during your Skype calls.

You raise your eyebrows at her, and she shakes her head, avoiding your eyes. Laura watches your interaction, and smoothly intervenes to tell her Dad about an old lady she’d met in in field that week.

Apparently Laura had been onsite to interview a specialist about a disease infecting local trees, but when the lady had seen her standing under a tree waiting, she’d insisted on telling her about every instance in which her cat had gotten lost and been found up the tree.

Carmilla and Laura’s father exchange an amused glance. “Was this Mrs Seever on Oak Crescent?”

Laura stares at them both, her head swivelling between the two of them. “Yeah… how the heck did you know that?”

Her father just laughs, and Carmilla looks deeply amused, “I’ve rescued that damn cat at least four times this year, Mrs Seever is notorious. The last person in has to take her phone calls.”

Laura laughs at that too. “That must be why you’ve been the rescuer so often,” she jokes, and Carmilla shares a private smile with her even as Laura’s father snorts aloud.

You wonder if they even notice the way Laura’s hand sits on Carmilla’s lower back, tracing slow circles at the dinner table.

  
  
  
  
  
  


You know your sister. And you know she avoids talking in general, but two categories in particular: things she very, very much wants, and things she very much doesn’t. Things that are very good, and things that are very, very bad.

You wonder where being Fire Chief and wanting Laura fall.

Laura drops you both home, and in the car, you ask about Carmilla becoming chief. Laura’s a little shocked you didn’t already know, but Carmilla’s Carmilla, and she says that she didn’t want to say anything til she knew for sure. She’s in training, sure, but she hasn’t been promised the spot, and though there are no other obvious candidates… she trails off. Laura makes fun of her, saying that she’d bet money on it over a year ago, and Carmilla rolls her eyes and tells her that her belief in her is touching but misguided. Laura’s glance in response is little short of adoring, even when she curses her out for that.

You let that one go; Carmilla isn’t exactly one to count her chickens.

When you’re walking up to the house, you have another question. “So you and Laura are close,” you say.

Carmilla’s face clouds, then she shrugs. “Yeah, I know you were pushing for us to be best friends forever, so I guess that makes you happy.”

That isn’t quite what you were thinking, but  it’s an admission of sorts. You think of them over lunch, Carmilla’s ease in finding an additional item of crockery, Laura’s hand on her lower back, the quiet conversation you’d interrupted them having on the front porch when you came back from getting a drink. The way their eyes linger on each other.

You can’t help yourself, you go right to the heart of it. “Carm, are you seeing Laura?”

She almost drops her keys. “No! Jesus, what gave you that idea?”

You ignore that question; there’s about a million things that give you that idea, and the way they spend most of their time staring at each other is half of them. “Because Laura’s pretty awesome, you know, and I would totally think that was a good thing.”

Carmilla’s uncomfortable now, her weight sliding from foot to foot. “Trust me, Will, we are not seeing each other. Laura does not think about me that way.”

“So, you do think about her that way?” You probe, and okay, now you’ve gone too far.

She snaps, “It doesn’t _matter_ how I think about her, William, we are not and never will be seeing each other or dating or fucking or whatever the _fuck_ it is you think is going on.” She finally succeeds in opening the front door, before she stomps up the stairs and stops to stare down at you from the top. “Don’t ask me about this again.”

She disappears, and you hear her bedroom door close. You don’t take off your jacket, but let yourself quietly back out of the house. If you know Carmilla at all, she won’t be coming back out of that room tonight. You think you probably have a friend or two left in this town who would let you crash on their couch.

  
  
  
  
  


When you come back the next morning, Carmilla makes you breakfast. You take the olive branch, and don’t ask any more questions.

For the rest of the week, she’s like a more polite version of her regular self. She asks about your course and offers you money if you need it and buys you a better winter coat. She falls asleep on the couch during dinner more than once, and leaves you coffee in the mornings when she’s gone early to work.

She doesn’t talk about the Fire Chief position again, and you don’t ask. And you don’t talk about Laura Hollis at all.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying this, please leave a comment to let me know. Kudos are nice, but words are worth a thousand words. Or something like that.
> 
> You can also find me at geoclaire.tumblr.com. Reblogs and follows make my day.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wrapping this one up, so if you've been lurking silently, this is your last opportunity to encourage me to write for Carmilla again. ;)
> 
> Thanks again to zbrockman for letting me play in her sandbox.

You go back to Canada.

For you, Canada is becoming more comfortable every day. It’s taken a while to settle in, true, but now you feel more like you fit here than you ever did in your home town after your mother died.

Here, no one looks at you and sees the second hand clothes your foster mother had dressed you in, or the brother of that troublemaker Carmilla Karnstein. Here, you’re just another young student scraping to get by on tips from the cafe and the office hours of your professors.

The anonymity is peaceful, and for a while it’s punctuated only by Carmilla’s irregular Skype calls, slotted in whenever it’s a reasonable hour for you both and she’s not working an insane night shift. For a while after your visit, she manages to consistently call while you’re in class, the little missed call icons showing up on your screen when you get home.

You’d call her back, but it’s already the middle of the night over there. You put it off for another day.

* * *

You’re pretty busy, anyway. You’ve moved to a three quarter load at university, and while it’ll help you get your degree sooner, it’s taking up a lot more of your time. Between that and your job, you’re not exactly swimming in free time.

Plus, you’ve started to meet people. Like, not that you hadn’t before, but your workmates and your fellow students, while perfectly decent people, never quite clicked with you the way you wanted them to. You can share a beer or a plate of fries, maybe spend an evening losing at trivia because you know nothing about hockey, but there’s no particular person you’d call if you needed immediate medical care.

Now that’s beginning to change. You’re not sure why now, maybe you just needed to spend a little more time settling in, but you have mates now. Guys from your classes who expect to see you and invite you to join their sports teams, who know your beer preference instead of asking every time. Guys who will talk, a little, about your classes and readings and know that you excel at hands on drawing and will trade tips on how to use the more counterintuitive design programs.

Plus, okay, you meet a girl.

Her name is Hannah and you meet her at work. More specifically, you met her when someone at work shouted your name at the exact wrong moment, so that you turned around and knocked the drink she was reaching to take from the counter directly down her dress.

You’ve rarely been mortified in your life, and she wasn’t exactly impressed at the time. But it turned out she lived a hundred metres down the block, and this was her coffee on the way to work, so it wasn’t the worst of all possible scenarios. That day, she went and changed, and by the time she’d returned, you’re remade her drink (upsized) with a rose drawn in the top, and you handed it to with her along with one of the drycleaning slips your boss kept behind the bar for exactly this kind of accident.

It didn’t quite get you off the hook for being a clumsy oaf, but after you’d spent a week giving her free drinks in apology, you were pretty sure she was over it. In any case, she traded you her number on a napkin for her coffee on Friday.

So, you’re pretty sure you’re forgiven, and maybe gone a little beyond that too.

* * *

 

After a couple of months, you think you and Hannah are pretty serious. Not deadset, let’s-get-married-and-have-eight-kids serious, but you’ve got a pretty good gauge on each other’s emotions and priorities. She’s a white collar girl, she works in an office and takes it very seriously, and she’s hoping to climb a rung or two on the ladder by the end of the year. She’s finished her degree, having knocked it over in the minimum time, but understands why yours is taking longer. She despises reality tv and has a cat called Mittens who you secretly believe is the dumbest cat to ever walk the Earth, but who’s pretty good at cuddling.

You haven’t met her parents, and you’re both fine with that, but one day she asks if you want to come meet her brother. You’re not really keen, but mostly because the invitation is to a hockey game.

You talk her into letting you meet them both after for dinner. And once Sean is done subtly interrogating you, Hannah reluctantly letting him do it, you think about your family and what they’d think of Hannah.

Your parents, they’d probably like that she’d well educated. Your mother would like that she’s well presented and well spoken. And because of your parents, you like that she doesn’t really like to drink.

Carmilla would like her, probably. Even if she is undecided on the pros and cons of you being over here. Hannah is clever and ambitious and stable, and those are things you think Carmilla would appreciate for you.

Hannah bumps you, and you come back to yourself. “Lost in thought, little guy?” Sean asks. “You could be a little more subtle, Hannah and I are right here,” he gestures to the both of them.

Hannah scoffs at the insinuation, and you remember to laugh a little. “No,” you tell them, “No need for subtlety. I was thinking about my sister.”

* * *

 

When you get home, Hannah starts fussing around your apartment to make tea. You don’t live together, but she’d been here earlier before she’d gone out together to meet her brother, and now her belongings are spread in a thin layer across your living room.

It’s a few minutes before it’s ready, and when she hands you your cup, you have to shake your head to snap yourself back to the present. You’d been absolutely miles and years away.

“Thanks,” you remember to say. Hannah smiles and drops down on the couch by you, pressing closer so that you lift your arm and put it around her.

She tilts her head against your jaw. “What’s got you so distracted?,” she asks.

You shrug a little. “Just thinking, I guess.”

“Uh _huh_. Does this have anything to do with your sister?” she asks shrewdly.

You scrunch your forehead looking at her. “What gave you that idea?”

It’s her turn to shrug. “I dunno, you looked a little funny talking about her earlier. And you don’t talk about her much, but lately you’ve been talking about her even less.”

“Mmmmm,” you allow. You cup your tea in one hand, appreciating the warmth. “We haven’t really been talking lately.”

“Ohhhh. Something happen?”

“Kinda? I don’t know. We sorta fought a little last time I visited, and now like… I don’t know what to say.”

Hannah looks up at you from your chest, quirks an eyebrow. “Do you need to apologise for something?”

“Ummm,” you think about it. “Maybe? I’m not sure,” and Hannah gives you a dubious look. “It’s complicated, Carmilla isn’t easy.”

She huffs a bit, but drops her head back onto your chest. “Will, if it’s bothering you this much, you probably need to apologise, okay? So save yourself some heartache and just do it.”

This is one of many things you like about Hannah: she makes complicated things seem straightforward. She makes confused emotions seem simple. Of course you should call your sister, you love her.

Hannah lifts her head off you to look at her watch, and groans. “It’s late, I should go,” she says.

You move to the edge of the couch, following her as she gets up. “You could stay, you know,”you offer, and she shoots you a grateful smile.

“That’s sweet, but I want to hit the gym with Leah tomorrow morning, so it’s easier if I’m coming from home,” she explains. You hum your acceptance, and she ducks back by you after she’s loaded herself with scarves and gloves, kissing you sweetly.

“I’ll text you when I’m home, okay?”

“Okay,” you tell her, your hands on her hips just remembering to let go as she pulls away.

She smiles again, already halfway out the door. “And call your sister!”

* * *

 

When she leaves, you drink your tea, and do your dishes, and even brush your teeth.

Then you stop putting off the inevitable and call Carmilla.

It takes her a while to answer, and you almost cancel the call twice. Just as you’re sure Skype is going to cancel the call, the video lights up and there’s your sister in all her sharp cut glory.

“Hey, Will,” she says, and it’s like it hasn’t been months since you spoke.

She seems in higher definition than usual, somehow, and it takes you a while to figure it out. It’s not better video quality that’s so clearly defining the line of her jaw; she’s lost weight and she’s even more sharp angles than usual.

You ask her about it, and she seems surprised, but she’s Carmilla, so probably she hasn’t even been paying attention to her weight. You figure probably she’s stressed, you know she’d accepted the Fire Chief role right around when you stopped talking and it makes sense that she’s spending less time on herself these days.

You talk a while. You talk a little shit, she tells you one or two things about the station and the guys, and you finally find the right opening and tell her, a little shyly, that you’re seeing someone. She nods, and asks you cautious questions about her, obviously pleased and yet equally obviously not wanting to press. It makes you smile, like everything about Hannah makes you smile, and you can can see both your own face and Carmilla’s carefully watching you on the screen.

You want to ask about Laura, but you don’t want to ruin this. So you nudge her a little more to talk about work, and the change in her face shows you immediately that this is the thing stressing her.

“We’ve got some kind of serial arsonist,” she admits after a while, and holy shit, that sounds terrible. You say as much.

She smirks. “Yeah, well, just another job for the fire department, I guess. Eventually we’ll get enough evidence to catch the guy, and in the meantime we just have to make sure no one gets hurt.”

“That sounds crazy difficult, Carm.” you say, and she shrugs.

“It’s work. Hey, how’s school?”

It’s a terrible segue, but you let it slide to keep the conversation going. And it barely matters anyway, because after a minute you plainly hear the doorbell ring on her end of the call.

“Expecting company?” You ask jokingly, and the look she gives you seems like panic before she controls it.

“Yeah, it’s uh, it’s just Laura. Picking me up for weekly lunch, you can get behind that right? Telling me how skinny I am now?” She teases, but she’s more tense than she’s been since you asked her about her pyromaniac. “I gotta go, okay Willy-boy? Don’t get into trouble.”

“Yeah bye,” You say quickly, but you’re not even sure she’s heard you with how quickly she cuts the call off.

You sit a minute in your desk chair, and then reluctantly you do the math. You don’t really doubt that it’s Laura, but it’s Saturday over there. And you remember very clearly that weekly lunch at her father’s house is on Sundays.

You already know you won’t bring it up with Carmilla.

* * *

 

Three months later, Laura calls you.

It’s the middle of the day and you’re in the middle of a shift, and you look down at your phone and see a name that hasn’t appeared in actual years, and you don’t hesitate to answer.

You take the next flight home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My brother Will is an architect.
> 
> Silent lurkers and vocal appreciators, I've enjoyed your companionship. Please let me know if you'v enjoyed this piece; I'm going to be prioritising original fic and am unlikely to return to this fandom without a guaranteed audience.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Cee for letting me play in her sandbox, and thank you to readers for their attention and feedback.


End file.
